Eggxtravaganza – @piratesofthecarbombinfantry

This past Holy Easter in Carlton Gardens, three artists—Jack Snow-Viener, Mia Cecil, Ollie Hunter—staged a celebratory hunt: an Eggxtravaganza. As with any performance piece today that fears to be forgotten, the work now exists online in documentation. Images through the rabbit’s eye reveal sequestered Lindt eggs burrowed into tree hollows, curls of leaves, and the Gardens’ historic moated fountain. Later posted as algorithm-suffocating spam on @piratesofthecarbombinfantry, the documentation remains without captions. This Instagram account, an “anarcho-nomadic project,” functions as an online gallery that represents a loose nexus of artists (many Narrm-residents) who submit their photographed artworks to the admins. Barriers to representation are none. In resorting to the piratical, quasi-militaristic logic of the account, Eggxtravaganza sets its conviviality against the performance’s circulation online: a post-ironic critique of art’s mandatory cross-pollination between the gallery (or garden) and the internet. Perhaps the Instagram grid is the logical ending to art history that Rosalind Krauss never foresaw? More likely, it is the present generation of artists’ online gesture toward institutional recognition in an offline world that will not so easily accommodate them.

MOTHER – National Gallery of Victoria

Amid record-low fertility rates, MOTHER marks the institutional rise of maternity discourse. This might signal a pronatalist Victorian state project, or a broader sense that humanity—for better or worse—has lost interest in its next iteration. In the first room is Untitled (1974), a photo series of homebirth. Christine Godden’s lens captures wry postpartum smiles and matter issuing from the body’s orifices: amniotic fluid, a gourd-like umbilical cord, birth goop and all. We are reminded that the cause of abjection is not a lack of cleanliness or morality, but instead what disturbs systems of order and repression. Across 200 works, the exhibition frames mothers as having done exactly this for millennia.

At its strongest, motherhood is framed as a site of contradiction: biological yet social, intimate yet political. But like its collection-siphon predecessor Queer, MOTHER retreats from the implications of its own argument. There is a noticeable didactic and visual porosity around mothers' libidinal desire. Even Bertram Mackennal's familiar Circe (1893), whose mythology entwines seduction, power and motherhood, is caught in a curatorial parallax that separates her maternity from her sexuality. An exhibition-wide Madonna–Whore misstep implies that motherhood is mutually exclusive from sexual desire (though I doubt a Freudian moral script was the intention). There is a silence on abortion that only underscores this omission. So, if the promise of the collection survey is revelation, what remains is a question of limits: less in what the NGV owns, than in what it is willing to say.

Julie Vinci – The Piss Painting – Oddaný

The miscreant; the anthropomorphic woman, in the public forum, pissing (‘using the restrum’) wherever her body desires. Discarded underpaintings read as discarded piss positions—the nervous fluster of a full bladder, knee-to-knee suppressions giving out in the subject’s full and final render. The artists wears the same stripes as in her paintings. Why isn’t she peeing too? I once read a book called Woo Woo, set Northside about an artist whose exhibition opening ended in her performance/psychic break as a pig. Maybe painting on it's own cannot really be true praxis... Vinci’s paintings are transgression’s stencil. I want to see her mark!

Dragging through – Conners Conners

I’m not exactly sure what the curators of this new show were talking about when they titled it Dragging through, but I assume it’s a reference to the idiomatic expression involving names and mud. If mud wasn’t their chosen substance, we see all the other possible forms of pejorative goop upon entrance in Oscar Elms’ Biggest indie party in Fitzroy (2026). The aftermath of a studio-visit-gone-wrong, Elms’ work would kill a Victorian child and every perpetrator of the Fitzroy garage sesh in one single viewing. Uniquely VCA detritus like Gamsol, pens, Fear and Loathing, and black gesso (or tar?) make up the scene. It’s a riot, it’s a party, it’s a painting in the expanded field!

The fantasy of Elms’ night is kept alive in Love is our canvas, lets splash some paint (2026) by Milly James. Bright bright neon yellow swathes of oil paint are spread across canvas and embellished with chux wipes (cloth) and alfoil (silver leaf). If I was initially right, and this show is about mud, I can’t help but think of James’ work as a cosmopolitan reduction of Gutai artist Kazuo Shiraga Challenging the Mud (1955), in which Shiraga wrestled with the titular muck in his undies.Performed three years after the dissolution of Japanese fascism, a similar chord can be drawn between the unrestrained, often grimy and rebellious spirit of these works and their negotiation of authority; snuggling the meeting point of bureaucracy and anarchy, Conners Conners is a small non-profit gallery embedded within Fitzroy Town Hall, cohabiting—somewhat absurdly—with the suburbs’ police force.

Anyway. I’m drawing probably meaningless comparisons and tangential thoughts. For the sixth iteration of the gallery’s annual exhibition for emerging artists, there is definitely though a guiding thread dragging me through the mire. It continues in Ignatz Cady Freer’s three works, whose titles all reference epidemiology: Pestilence (YMCA) (2026), Self Portrait At 8 Years Old After Recovering From Croup (Collaborative Frame With My Neighbours 4 Year Old) (2026), and Syphilitic Ulceration Of The Nose (The French Disease) (2026).Affectively nostalgic, the 53x43cm frames are formally naïve but capture the brilliant self-awareness of a hypochondriacal schoolchild. Disease appears as an inflamed (admittedly disturbing) muzzle in penline. I begin to think of how pest and pestilence are etymological cousins, how disease mongers fear—misread in the advent of the AIDS epidemic, resurfacing in the panic of SARS, lingering wherever bodies are made suspect. The artist maybe wants me to not be disturbed by the messed up nose. Not too sure. Formally, Freer’s drawings aren’t really visually compelling, but I can get around the frames, which are wooden and drilled straight into the wall with two big screws each and decorated with scribble. They’re messy and remind me of being snotty nosed at the Steiner school I attended from ages 4 to 10.

The abject and the playfully grotesque are offset by the remaining works in the show which embody a refined sanctity; the heaven-sent roommate who finishes James’ failed chux-wipe attempt to clean the aftermath of Elms’ party. Party v parents. Kostas Pavlidis’ Lamp #1-#3 (2026) are not actually lamps, but stained-glass cases. The first one reads as industrial and mildly ecclesiastical, maybe the siphoned offcuts of St Paul’s cathedral. Gemma Topliss’ sculpture on the adjacent gallery wall is a matte black, wall-mounted relief composed of interlocking curved and cylindrical forms, arranged with a strict, almost mechanical symmetry. Its scalloped upper register and repeated grooves recall the ridged body of a frog güiro.

A mud vs meticulousness binary feels obvious to me, and so too do its exceptions... I’m really nearing the end of my effort for this writing so I’ll keep it short from here on in. In the centre of the second gallery sits a sculpture of a soccer ball by Jesse Deng from over at HAIR. Its made from bronze, and is both play and seriousness in tandem. A kick of that would hurt. Just bit my tongue (keyboard) and stopped myself from writing 'Ouch!' Above the sculpture, a roughly two-by-three metre canvas by Chelsea Young looms: monumental, featuring the blood and gore of a crushed beetle, which sits idly by a belladonna in bold acrylic hues. The painting is in her signature visual language, with its subject transporting me back in time to her portrait of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty at Cathedral Cabinet last year.

There's something to be said here of the collapse between chaos/order, art/law, play/discipline... but Rosalind is a belladonna too, and all beautiful women deserve their beauty sleep.

Hazel Walker Walsh – Precious – Cathedral Cabinet

My initial thought was along the lines of Rauschenberg’s extension of the canvas question in Monogram (1955–59); i.e. his invented third-thinged inbrededness of sculpture/painting/craft. But placing his chauvinistic rhetoric on a piece titled ‘Precious,’ which hangs in Cathedral Cabinet like a lovely trail of over-ripened grapes, or the remnant paper-mache balloons of a school fete, felt wrong… so scratch all that (kind of). It’s quietly a little twee—which is perhaps why I like it.

Who is she?